2011 will go down in the history books as a great year for tablets mostly for Apple's iPad however, not all tablet vendors fared as well as Apple. It's not for lack of products that prevented Android tablets from taking any market share away from Apple this year. By our calculation, over 100 tablets were introduced since the iPad however, we defy even the most tech-savvy of you to name more than a few of them. What was so wrong with the competition that it failed to make any inroads in the tablet market, at least until the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook came along?

Also you comment is totally missing the point, we are talking about the interface between the person and the machine not how you repair it.

99% of all bicycles work more or less the same with minor difference, unless you have a penny farthing, a recumberate or a fixed gear.

Not quite. The OP of this thread stated "I want a tablet on which I can install Linux, Java, Python, etc... if I want to".

For me, this falls in the "easily serviceable" category. A device can provide this kind of option, typically with a "root switch" deep in the settings or an unlocked bootloader, without harming the normal user experience in anyway.

I stand corrected about bikes, though I was thinking about low- and mid-end hybrid bikes (sub-600€), which is what I'm familiar with. On those, you really know what to expect, except for a few nonstandard oddities like saddle tube thickness or tire width. From that point, I was incorrectly assuming that the rest of the bike world just follows.

Not quite. The OP of this thread stated "I want a tablet on which I can install Linux, Java, Python, etc... if I want to".

For me, this falls in the "easily serviceable" category. A device can provide this kind of option, typically with a "root switch" deep in the settings or an unlocked bootloader, without harming the normal user experience in anyway.

No that falls into the easily customizable, which is a totally different category than serviceablility. I appreciate that they overlap, but they aren't the same thing.

Tablets are a product that happens to be a computer. I am sure there are niche suppliers (much like my odd bicycle parts) for it ... but you will have to pay a higher price.

No that falls into the easily customizable, which is a totally different category than serviceablility. I appreciate that they overlap, but they aren't the same thing.

Well, I agree that "serviceability" is not the proper word, but I am not sure that "customizability" is, either. A Samsung sales rep would tell you that a fully-locked Android is easily customizable because you can, without much hassle, install a wide range of new software and put widgets on your desktop.

Is there a short expression in English to describe the concept of being able to do the same things as the OEM with your computer ?

Tablets are a product that happens to be a computer. I am sure there are niche suppliers (much like my odd bicycle parts) for it ... but you will have to pay a higher price.

Well, there are ARM development platforms, if you are ready to spend the price of a finished tablet for a bare-bones circuit board with a touchscreen attached to it that doesn't boot unless you install an OS yourself first, and that only features incomplete technical hardware documentation

It's just a far cry from current desktops and laptops where you can just press Esc during boot in order to boot another OS, and where every software available on the internet may be installed without a huge hassle. Though Secure Boot may change that for OSs...